Book cancel culture is the latest right wing craze. Greg Sargent brings us up to date:
In recent weeks, it has become inescapably obvious: The mania for muzzling how teachers address race and other topics is only accelerating.
We’re seeing dozens of GOP proposals to bar whole concepts from classrooms outright. The Republican governor of Virginia has debuted a mechanism for parents to rat out teachers. Bills threatening punishment of them are proliferating. Book-banning efforts are outpacing anything in recent memory.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
Amid this onslaught, a proposed bill now advancing in the New Hampshire legislature deserves renewed scrutiny. It would ban the advocacy of any “doctrine” or “theory” promoting a “negative” account of U.S. history, including the notion that the United States was “founded on racism.”
Additionally, the bill describes itself as designed to ensure teachers’ “loyalty,” while prohibiting advocacy of “subversive doctrines.”
This proposal is drawing heightened attention from teachers and their representatives. With the push for constraints on teachers intensifying, they worry that if it succeeds, it could become a model in other states.
“It’s the next step in their campaign to whitewash our history by rewriting it,” Megan Tuttle, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association, told me in a statement.
If this passes, it will “stifle real discussion” in classrooms, Tuttle said, adding: “Then it’s only a matter of time before similar legislation has the same impact on classrooms around the country.”
This proposal opens a window on much of what’s wrong with the current wave of censoring panic. Many new proposals and laws are sloppily drafted, vaguely defining entire concepts off limits, such as “anti-American ideologies” or anything that deviates from undefined conceptions of the nation’s “authentic founding.”
The vagueness of such prohibitions seems like a feature, not a bug. Taken alongside these proposals’ new punishments for teachers, they seem designed to make teachers feel perpetually at risk of running afoul of the law in ways they cannot anticipate.
This seems to go beyond the exercise of traditional state government authority to shape curriculums. Instead, it treats teachers as subversive elements to be rooted out at the slightest deviation from orthodoxy.
The New Hampshire bill offers a template for advancing this project. By explicitly stating its goal of prohibiting “advocacy of subversive doctrines” and ensuring teacher “loyalty,” it treats as its very premise the idea that a subversive element lurking within must be purged.
“I have not seen any other bill like this one,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who documents these proposals, told me. While old laws still on the books in some states require teacher loyalty oaths, Sachs said, this bill’s “loyalty” language is unique.
They’re making America great again by instituting “loyalty oaths” for teachers. These are the same people who backed a coup, staged an insurrection and threatened to hang the Vice President. I think the question we need to be asking these people is “loyalty to what?” Or should I say “loyalty to whom?”
Any question why this is happening?
Teachers are educated people. Many of the best of them do the underpaid, disrespected job because it’s a calling. Treating them like traitors will drive them out of the field which I suppose is just another step in the ongoing crusade to destroy public education altogether.
These state legislators and school boards are extremists who are demonstrating the right wing agenda for the rest of us. Their plan is to gain and retain power by any means necessary and use it to impose their worldview on the rest of the country by force. In other words, fascism.